Preserves & Pickles

I’m not sure why, but people seem very judgmental and ill-informed about the whole business of pickling. I mean, when you get down to it, “a pickled vegetable” is really just a vegetable that someone has poured vinegar over and then walked away from for a few minutes. Yeh, that’s all.
It was only in a recent conversation with my mother, during which her reaction to pickling was “oh, that’s gonna take FOREVER,” that I became aware of the misconception. As if pickling is a task that is culturally united with basket...

I’m not gonna lie. When I went to the Asian grocery store and found the “prepared mustard greens” in the refrigerated section, they looked like a bag full of some mangled swamp creature. Basically, they’ve been pre-preserved in some way so they can sit on a shelf indefinitely, awaiting transformation. My main thought was “these are probably gonna taste like shit.”
Well, after a couple good baths and a splash of vinegar here and there, these mustard greens turned out to be pretty darn spectacular. I served them as a side...